Description
Book SynopsisTowards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema: The Outside of Film is a contribution to an aesthetics of cinema rooted in Marxist theory. Rather than focusing on the role that certain films, or the cinema as an institution, might play in political consciousness, the book asks a different question: how can the subject of politics in film be thought? This problem is presented in a systematic-theoretical rather than historical manner. The main aim of this book is a retrospective rehabilitation of the psychoanalytical concept of "suture," whose political core is progressively revealed. In a second step, this rereading of "suture"-theory is mediated with the Marxist aesthetics of Fredric Jameson. From the perspective of this reconfigured aesthetics of negativity, films by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Haneke and Kubrick are analyzed as articulations of a political unconscious.
Trade Review"Delivered in a crisp translation, this ambitious book’s clarifying distance from the lasting accomplishments of apparatus theory goes far toward erasing any trace of oxymoron in its title. And in the emphasis of its subtitle — with the camera variously recognized as severed from the spaces it preserves only by rearticulating — cinema’s narrative inside emerges as the material effect of its outside: not just technically but culturally. Synthesized as never before across a deep field of previous theorization, the conditioning surround of the screen image, in politics as well as production, is studied rigorously by Lie, and often brilliantly,
from the inside out — in powerful extrapolations earned across nimble readings of celluloid and digital cinematography from rear projection in Marnie to pixel tessellations in
Miami Vice."
- Garrett Stewart, author of "Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method" (2020)
"Lie's book
Towards a Political Aesthetics of Cinema fulfills the title's promise by re-reading and re-viewing theories and films to engender indeed a political aesthetics. Avoiding the sheer application of political theories on cinema Lie challenges some of the paradigms of modern film theory for their relevance for an aesthetic of cinema. In Lie's powerful understanding of cinema the off screen space in cinematic shots becomes a complex membrane between world and fiction. Intense shot analyses are the bearers of the argument that political aesthetics of cinema are based in the ways films are framing and deframing the world."
- Gertrud Koch
Table of ContentsNew Preface to the English Edition
Preface
Part I: The Absent Cause of Film: On the Theory of Enunciation and Suture
Introduction
1. On Enunciation in Apparatus Theory
1.1 Imaginary Enunciation, or the Place of the Spectator: Christian Metz (1)
1.2 Voyeuristic Enunciation, or the Place of the Author: Raymond Bellour
1.3 The Double Énoncé, or the Division of the Filmic Image: World Projection as Rear-projection in Marnie
2. On Enunciation without an Enunciator: Suture
2.1 Negative Enunciation, or the Place of the Absent One: Jean-Pierre Oudart
2.2 Masked Enunciation, the Place of the Apparatus: Daniel Dayan
2.3 The Schizoid Suture, or the Division of Body and Voice: Acousmatics as Schismatics in Psycho
3. On the Pragmatics of Enunciation
3.1 Deictic Enunciation, or Film as Speech Act: Francesco Casetti
3.2 Impersonal Enunciation, or Film as Writing: Christian Metz (2)
3.3 Looking at the Camera, or the Theatricalization of Film: Jean-Luc Godard
4. On the Acousmatics of Enunciation: Back to the Suture
4.1 External Enunciation, or the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye: Jacques Lacan/Kaja Silverman
4.2 Extimate Enunciation, or the Gaze as Bodiless Organ: Joan Copjec/Slavoj ˜i¸ek
4.3 From the Hors-champ to the Hors-lieu, or the Transsubjective Point of View: The Unrepresentable in Rossellini and Antonioni
5. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of the Repressed: Caché
Part II: Allegories of Totality: Fredric Jameson's Political Film Aesthetics
Introduction
6. The Dialectics of Mass Culture 6.1 Reification and Utopia: Jaws and The Godfather
6.2 Class and Allegory: Dog Day Afternoon
6.3 The Political Unconscious
7. Cartographies of the Postmodern
7.1 Nostalgia und Historicism
7.2 The Totalization of Totality: Cognitive Mapping
7.3 The Implosion of the Referent: Blow-Up
8. Geopolitical Aesthetics
8.1 Totality as Conspiracy
8.2 Conspirational Enunciation, or the Acousmatics of the Paranoia Film
8.3 Digital Cinema in the Age of Globalization: Miami Vice
9. The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
